Coren adapted tests used for human infants to research dogs’ language-learning abilities. “We found that the average dog has a mental age of between two and two-and-a-half years [in human terms],” he says, one of his dogs barking in the background. “The super-dogs, the upper 20% in terms of intelligence, have a mental age of between two-and-a-half and three.” We can extrapolate this, he says, to other mental and emotional capabilities. “If an average two-and-a-half-year-old is expected to have these abilities, then the first guess would be that a dog would have those abilities.”
Young children recognise when the number of objects they’ve been looking at changes; dogs do too. Coren says dogs can count up to five. Between the ages of one and three, a child will learn to respond to a pointing gesture. “At about age two, the average child will know there’s something interesting there, and will usually look in that direction.” Dogs will do the same. But, he says, “wolves don’t have that response, even if they’ve been reared with a human family”.
One area where dogs beat toddlers is memory. Think of how much you remember from when you were around two (probably nothing). “However, dogs have a good memory and there are lots of examples,” says Coren. He recalls a colleague’s dog that had previously been owned by the colleague’s Czech father, who had taught the dog commands in his native language. The colleague inherited the dog when it was about 18 months old, and it lived with him and his English-speaking family. Around seven years later, when a relative from the Czech Republic visited, the dog still responded to commands in Czech.
In terms of emotions, Coren says that the average two-and-a-half-year-old human “will have all of the basic emotions – fear, aggression, love, surprise and disgust, but complex social emotions like guilt don’t show up until a child is about four”. Many dog owners will claim that they can instantly recognise their dog’s “guilty face” – and there are numerous pictures and videos online of dogs apparently looking remorseful – but this is anthropomorphism at work again, as a study by Alexandra Horowitz, an expert in canine cognition, has shown. “Dogs don’t feel guilt, and those expressions you see are really fear, because they know that when they see their owner and the evidence of their transgression, then bad things happen,” says Coren.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/apr/26/whos-a-clever-boy-the-average-dog-has-a-mental-age-of-about-two-but-what-are-they-really-thinking
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